The Liberation of Bergen-Belsen, 15
April 1945

Commandant Josef Kramer
was immediately arrested by the British liberators

The Bergen-Belsen concentration camp
was voluntarily turned over to the Allied 21st Army Group, a
combined British-Canadian unit, on April 15, 1945 by Reichsführer-SS
Heinrich Himmler, the man who was in charge of all the concentration
camps. Bergen-Belsen was in the middle of the war zone where
British and German troops were fighting in the last days of World
War II and there was a danger that the typhus epidemic in the
camp would spread to the troops on both sides.

Before negotiations with the British
began, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, the head of the Reich Security Main
Office (RSHA), had sent an order on April 7, 1945, directly to
the Commandant of Bergen-Belsen, Josef Kramer, that all the prisoners
in the camp should be killed, rather than let them fall into
the hands of the enemy, according to Gerald Fleming, author of
"Hitler and the Final Solution," who wrote that this
order had come from Hitler himself. When this news reached representatives
of the World Jewish Congress in Stockholm, they contacted Felix
Kersten, a Swedish chiropractor who had treated Himmler. According
to Fleming, Kersten succeeded in persuading Himmler to reverse
the order. When Hitler heard this, he flew into a rage, according
to Fleming.

Eva Olsson was a 20-year-old Hungarian
Jewess who was sent to Auschwitz in May 1944 and later transferred
to Bergen-Belsen where she was liberated on April 15, 1945. After
Olsson gave a talk to students at the Canadian WC Eaket Secondary
School in Blind River, "The Standard" reported the following from her presentation:

"Six days before we were liberated
the Gestapo (Germany's secret police) had given orders that on
April 15, at 3 o'clock in the afternoon all prisoners were to
be shot."

The shootings continued even after
the camp was seized, done out of sight of Allied forces.

Olsson explains after the camp was
taken a British officer made a declaration. The man said for
every prisoner killed now that the camp was taken a German official
or guard would be executed immediately.

Hungarian soldiers in the Germany Army,
who had been sent to keep order while the camp was transferred
to the British, were in fact shot by the British, according to
British soldiers who participated in the liberation.

Negotiations for the transfer of the
Bergen-Belsen camp to the British took several days. Then on
the night of April 12, 1945, a cease-fire agreement was signed
between the local German Military Commander and the British Chief
of Staff, Brigadier General Taylor-Balfour, according to Eberhard
Kolb in his book, "Bergen-Belsen from 1943 to 1945."

An area of 48 square kilometers around
Bergen-Belsen was declared a neutral zone. The neutral zone was
8 kilometers long and 6 kilometers wide. Until British troops
could take over, the agreement specified that the camp would
be guarded by a unit of Hungarian soldiers and soldiers from
the German Wehrmacht (the regular army as opposed to the SS).
They were assured that they would be allowed free return passage
to the German lines within six days after the British arrived.
The SS soldiers who made up the staff of the camp were to remain
at their posts and carry on their duties until the British arrived
to take over. There was no specific stipulation in the agreement
about what their fate would be, according to Eberhard Kolb.

On the afternoon of Sunday, April 15th,
British soldiers arrived at the German Army training garrison,
next door to the concentration camp, and the transfer of the
neutral territory of the Bergen-Belsen camp was made. A short
time later, a group of British officers entered the concentration
camp, which was right next to the garrison, although the distance
by road was about 1.5 kilometers.

The first British units to enter the
camp, in a van with a loudspeaker, were from the 14 Amplifier
Unit, Intelligence Corps and 63rd Anti-Tank Regiment, Royal Artillery.
Three of the soldiers on the tanks were Jewish. Chaim Herzog
was a young Jewish officer with the Intelligence Corps; he later
became Israel's Ambassador to the UN and then President of Israel.
In honor of the part he played in the liberation of Bergen-Belsen,
an honorary tombstone has been placed near the Jewish Monument
at the Memorial Site which is now on the grounds of the former
camp.

Child survivors at
Bergen-Belsen

According to Michael Berenbaum in his
book "The World Must Know," Commandant Josef Kramer
greeted British officer Derrick Sington at the entrance to the
camp, wearing a fresh uniform. Berenbaum wrote that Kramer expressed
his desire for an orderly transition and his hopes of collaborating
with British. He dealt with them as equals, one officer to another,
even offering advice as to how to deal with the "unpleasant
situation." That same day, Commandant Kramer was arrested
by the British; five months later he was brought before a British
Military Tribunal as a war criminal.

On April 8, 1945, around 25,000 to 30,000
prisoners had arrived at Bergen-Belsen from other concentration
camps in the Neuengamme area. On that date, there were over 60,000
prisoners in the camp and some had to be housed in the barracks
of the adjacent Army Training Center. The Geneva Convention specified
that civilian prisoners were to be evacuated from a war zone,
and up until this time, the Nazi concentration camps had been
either evacuated or abandoned as the war progressed. But because
of the typhus epidemic, it was impossible to evacuate all the
prisoners from Bergen-Belsen. The camp could not be abandoned
for fear that the epidemic would spread to the soldiers of both
sides.

Between April 6 and April 11, 1945, three
transports of Jews were evacuated from the Neutrals camp, the
Star Camp and the Hungarian Camp on the orders of Heinrich Himmler.
These were prisoners who held foreign passports and were considered
"exchange Jews."

Brigadier Llewelyn Glyn-Hughes, a medical
officer, was in command of the relief operation. The British
had known that there were terrible epidemics in the camp, and
that this was the main reason the camp had been surrendered,
but they were unprepared for the gruesome sight of the dead bodies,
and it came as an enormous shock to them.

In a book entitled "The Belsen Trial"
by Raymond Phillips, published in 1949, Brigadier Glyn-Hughes
is quoted in this description of the terrible scene that the
British found at Bergen-Belsen:

"The conditions in the camp were
really indescribable; no description nor photograph could really
bring home the horrors that were there outside the huts, and
the frightful scenes inside were much worse. There were various
sizes of piles of corpses lying all over the camp, some in between
the huts. The compounds themselves had bodies lying about in
them. The gutters were full and within the huts there were uncountable
numbers of bodies, some even in the same bunks as the living.
Near the crematorium were signs of filled-in mass graves, and
outside to the left of the bottom compound was an open pit half-full
of corpses. It had just begun to be filled. Some of the huts
had bunks but not many, and they were filled absolutely to overflowing
with prisoners in every state of emaciation and disease. There
was not room for them to lie down at full length in each hut.
In the most crowded there were anything from 600 to 1000 people
in accommodation which should only have taken 100. [...]

There were no bunks in a hut in the
women's compound which contained the typhus patients. They were
lying on the floor and were so weak they could hardly move. There
was practically no bedding. In some cases there was a thin mattress,
but some had none. Some had draped themselves in blankets, and
some had German hospital type of clothing. That was the general
picture."

Typhus barracks at
Bergen-Belsen had no bunks

One of the survivors who was liberated
that day was Adam Koenig, a German Jew, born in 1923. A week
after the war began in 1939, Koenig was sent to Sachsenhausen,
a camp near Berlin. In October 1942, he was transferred to Auschwitz.
Koenig's parents and four of the eight children in his family
died in the Holocaust; his father died at Auschwitz. Koenig survived
the death march out of Auschwitz in January 1945, and ended up
at Bergen-Belsen where he was among those who had survived after
six years of imprisonment by the Nazis. In 2005, on the 60ieth
anniversary of the liberation of the camps, 82-year-old Adam
Koenig and his wife Maria, also an Auschwitz survivor, were still
active in giving lectures to students to keep the memory of the
Holocaust alive.

Reverend Leslie H. Hardman was the 32-year-old
Senior Jewish Chaplain to the British Forces, attached to 8 Corp
of the British 2nd Army when Bergen-Belsen was liberated. Hardman
was born in Wales; his father was from Poland and his mother
was from Russia. After the war, he wrote a book entitled "The
Survivors - the story of the Belsen remnant" (Vallentine,
Mitchell & Co. Ltd) in which he described what he saw at
Bergen-Belsen.

He wrote that when he first approached
the camp, he saw posters which warned "Danger - Typhus."
Once inside the camp he was horrified at what he saw. He wrote
that Belsen consisted of several wooden barracks, fifty metres
long, poorly constructed and possessing window openings and doorways
devoid of windows or doors so that the huts became effective
wind tunnels for the freezing winter climate to do its worst.
The roofs leaked so that straw scattered on the floor quickly
became sodden. The beds were mere planks of wood. Each barrack
housed seven thousand, according to Hardman's account.

Chaplain Hardman wrote that illness was
endemic and medical treatment was unknown. Each day the outdoor
roll call in freezing conditions lasted for four hours or more
and those who fell down were dead. He described the camp as so
lice-ridden that the clothes appeared to move on their own. Victims
scratched themselves on the struts, which held the hut together
and developed open sores and boils, which became infected. And
then came typhus with such ferocity that a quarter of all the
men and women in the camp died.

Lt. Lawrence Aslen was one of the British
soldiers who was there on the day of the liberation of the camp.
According to his son, Niall Alsen, his father "arrived some
hours after the first troops, but his first impression was that
bodies were everywhere, certainly hundreds if not several thousands."
Lt. Alsen told his son that "the scale of the problem just
overwhelmed them. There were so many more in the huts as well
that it became a priority to get them disposed of to lessen the
attrition from disease. Many British soldiers were not vaccinated,
but the SMO (Senior medical Officer) of the field hospital ordered
emergency inoculations for everybody. Even so, several British
soldiers contracted typhus and a severe form of dysentery. Happily
none of them died."

In an e-mail to me, Niall Alsen wrote
that as far as his father was concerned, the SS guards at Bergen-Belsen
"were utterly evil and depraved murderers who should all
have been hanged." Alsen said that his father described
the inmates as lethargic, listless and lost. To them, the British
were just another lot of troops sent to guard them and it took
several days before many of them believed they were actually
free. This transition came when nurses from the field hospital
began taking the sick away to a converted barracks nearby, and
it was the sight of these women that told them they were liberated.
When they began to feed the inmates with high calorie food, it
actually killed some of them, who were so unused to real food.
Alsen said that his father only really spoke to him about Bergen-Belsen
a couple of times. He was too badly traumatized by the experience
to talk about it.

Niall Alsen said that his father told him that the photograph
of the woman guard, who looks very angry in the phtotograph below,
was taken just after the guards had been paraded past the survivors
and told that they were to start burying the bodies. Niall wrote
in an e-mail to me:

Many of them demurred and protested;
possibly this is the moment it was captured on film. A Sergeant
told them in German "You bastards created this F***ing mess
so you can F***ing well clear it up!"

Women guards at Bergen-Belsen

In answer to my question about whether
the British liberators had killed any of the Hungarian soldiers,
who were sent to the camp to help with the transition and were
promised that they could return to their lines after six days,
Alsen wrote the following, based on what his father Lt. Lawrence
Alsen had told him:

Yes, some of them were shot out of
hand for mutiny. A burial detail of Hungarians refused to handle
the dead bodies. One officer refused to obey the order saying
it was contrary to the Geneva Convention. The captain in charge
immediately told them they were under martial law and any refusal
was mutiny. The officer still refused and so did four of his
men. The captain drew his revolver and cocked it, pointing it
at the officer's forehead. The officer still refused and the
captain shot him dead. The other four attempted to rush the captain,
a somewhat foolish attempt against 8 loaded sten guns in the
hands of men itching to use them. All five ended up in one of
the grave pits. The officer then reported what he had done to
the Colonel who told him not to worry: "You've just saved
the hangman a job."

In response to my question about whether
any of the SS guards had died from typhus after being forced
to handle the dead bodies with their bare hands, Niall Alsen
answered as follows, based on what his father Lt. Lawrence Alsen
had told him:

That report is true. They were also
made to live in one of the huts in the same filthy conditions
as the Inmates and fed the same basic rations; that could also
be the reason so many contracted Typhus. However, there are suspicions
that two of the more sadistic guards were thrown into one of
the huts by British troops for a lark; they were kicked and punched
to death. (Death by natural causes?) My father said it was very
difficult to control the men from meting out summary justice;
perhaps it would have been better if that had happened.

Bergen-Belsen survivors
line up for food

Sign put up by the
British after Bergen-Belsen was liberated

One of the prisoners who had arrived
in Bergen-Belsen in early February 1945 on a transport from Sachsenhausen
was Rudolf Küstermeier, who wrote the following, which was
quoted in Derrick Singleton's book "Belsen Uncovered,"
published in 1946.

In the night before April 15 I lay
awake and only fell asleep in the small hours. Suddenly I was
woken up by one of the Russian workers in our block. "Come,
come, quick! There are tanks on the street." I heard the
unmistakable clanking, rumbling noise...From far I heard the
tanks pass through the camp entrance and a voice call from a
loud speaker van. I knew we were free. I lay there musing. Incessantly
I had to fend off fleas and bugs who did not stop torturing me
for a minute. I was feverish and my head was heavy and stupefied,
but I was aware of the fact that we were free. More than eleven
years of imprisonment were over. I lived. I would have a chance
to recover. I would be able to participate in the tasks of reconstruction.
I did not think of revenge but I knew that the most devilish
tyranny the modern world had seen had lost its last footing,
and that there would be a chance now for new men and a new life.
I was filled with a deep sense of gratitude.

Küstermeier was a Social Democrat
who was arrested on November 19, 1933 on a charge of doing illegal
activities against the Nazi regime. He was tried and convicted
by the Volksgerichtshof (the People's High Court) and sentenced
to ten years in prison. After he had served his time, he was
sent to a concentration camp to be placed under protective custody
as an enemy of the state. In August 1945, he wrote a report which
was included in the book, "Belsen Uncovered" by Derrick
Sington. An excerpt from his report is quoted below:

Then the last phase began. The SS
provided civilian clothes and rucksacks for themselves to prepare
for their disappearance. They barely entered the huts anymore,
and the dreadful roll-calls stopped. Here and there in the camp
small groups of prisoners assembled in order to take over the
administration if necessary.

But the SS did not intend to leave
without an escort. They published an appeal, especially to the
Germans and Poles, to fight voluntarily on the side of the SS
against the Allied forces. A few days later all the Germans,
except for a few who went their own ways, were assembled in a
hut, and the majority, above all most of the Block Elders and
Kapos, left with the SS on April 14.

It had become known shortly beforehand
that an agreement had been made between British and German officers
declaring the camp neutral territory. This was not announced
officially, but the changes which occurred seemed to corroborate
the rumors. Most of the SS men disappeared and in their stead
Hungarian troops and soldiers of the German Wehrmacht appeared.
The remaining SS had the special task of repairing the camp and
especially of taking the dead to the mass graves.

Bergen-Belsen inmates
drag diseased body using a blanket

Thousands of bodies in various stages
of decomposition were lying in heaps all over the camp. As their
last task before turning the camp over to the British, the SS
began repairing the camp and trying to bury the bodies in mass
graves which were dug in a remote spot about one kilometer from
the barracks. Between April 11 and April 14, all prisoners in
the camp who were still able to work were recruited to help with
burial of the corpses. While two prisoner's orchestras played
dancing music, 2000 inmates dragged the corpses using strips
of cloth or leather straps tied to the wrists or ankles. This
monstrous spectacle went on for four days, from six in the morning
until dark. Still, there were 10,000 rotting corpses remaining
in the camp.

Corpses are gathered
at the site of one of the mass graves

Sick prisoners were moved to the hospital
at the German Army base right next to the camp. The photo below
shows prisoners who are recovering from typhus and other diseases.